Of Oriental Princesses And White Slags

When Jade Goody, Shilpa Shetty’s tormentor-in-chief,made a tearful penitent exit from the Big Brother House a few days ago (to befollowed, apparently, by a penitent pilgrimage to India), it was not a triumphfor anti-racism. It tells us rather more about the trivialising of politics andnarrowing of political consciousness. It was the triumph of weak and lazypolitical correctness which, in the long run, will undermine real, moresustained anti-racist work. As a nervous Jade was subjected to a Socraticexercise in political correctness by McCall, an unlikely schoomistress, I felttwinges of that familiar discomfort we all felt last week witnessing thespectacle of one person forced to confront determined and more powerfulinterrogators.

The offensive remarks made on Celebrity Big Brother reeked of schoolyardracism and xenophobia. During my teenage years an English friend insisted that Ismelled of curry. Perhaps I did and still do (but subtler cuisine than thisdreadful British pub variety). It’s a rare Asian kid that hasn’t experiencedsome form of juvenile nastiness and worse. Repeatedly referring to someone as‘the Indian’ dehumanises them. Shilpa ‘Fuckawallah’ is not the innocentconcoction of someone straining to recall a surname. It stems from thecomplacent carelessness of an ethnic majority than doesn’t need to learnanything about the minorities in its midst, even how to pronounce a name. Manyof us routinely deal with variants of such behaviour in our daily lives. I, likemany other Asians and blacks, have been hit and called a ‘fucking foreigner’,even in the cobbled streets of genteel Cambridge.

For British Asians, the public display of familiar battles poked at rawwounds, inspiring large numbers to protest. I would feel a lot more excitedabout this apparent resurgence of anti-racist awareness if recent years hadshown evidence of a real activist spirit among us. Where were these tens ofthousands of protesting voices when young Zahid Mubarak died at the hands of awhite racist cellmate with whom he should not have been made to share a cell?When a few hundred Sikh women protested alone at discriminatory treatment byBritish Airways meal supplier, Gate Gourmet? When British Asian Muslims havebeen confined and tortured illegally in that black hole of racism known asGuantanamo Bay with the acquiescence of the Blair government? Why did only asmall minority of British Asians speak up when ‘Hindu’ criminals in thestate of Gujarat, to which many are linked by familial ties, raped and killedthousands of Muslims in horrific pogroms in February 2002 in an attempt atethnic cleansing?

Too many of us have been busy unhooking themselves from the collective term‘British Asians’ and dividing ourselves into Hindu, Sikhs, Muslims,Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. The terms ‘Asian’ and (heaven forbidnow!) ‘Black’ were rallying points in the anti-racist organising of the 70sand 80s whereas ‘British Asians’ as a category have been largely absent fromrecent political discourse. Few displayed the kind of outrage CBB has elicitedwhen institutional racism in police forces was exposed. I can’t help wonderingwhere these angry voices were when a Sikh playwright, Gurpreet Bhatti, was, yes,bullied by loud voices within her own community and even subjected todeath threats. Why is ‘profiling’ seen as a ‘Muslim’ issue? Where werethe custodians of Asian dignity when crews filming Monica Ali’s eponymousnovel were hounded out of Brick Lane by Islamists and chauvinists? When artistM.F. Hussain’s exhibition was shut down because of vandalism by goonsapparently representing hurt Hindu sentiments?

Of course, a large part of the problem is preciselythis: apart from the sterling work done by a few dedicated individuals andorganisations, anti-racist politics has itself become a facile ‘representations’game which involves appeasing the fragile sensitivities of a vocal few claimingto represent the community as a whole. It is about harassing artists andwriters, demanding that they conform to ‘right’ ways of representing thecommunity. Meanwhile, India’s favourite cultural pastime currently is ‘Representingthe Nation’, the very task Shilpa announced for herself as she entered the BBcompound. As the country anxiously finds its place within the community of bigglobal players and tries to reconcile its obvious economic successes with theglaring (and often, deepening) inequalities that still mar its social landscapeand self-image, it is increasingly obsessed with disseminating the myth of thenation as fundamentally middle-class, professional and successful. The task haspartly fallen on the feminine shoulders of India’s flourishing glamourindustry. Thus the national delirium in 1994 when Indians won both the MissWorld and Miss Universe crowns.

This anxiety to belong to the global community of the economically successfulexplains Shilpa’s repeated protests that she is not from the ‘slums’ anddid not grow up on the ‘roadside’ (she’d include council estates, if wehad them in India). For all her disagreements with Jade, they seem to agree thateconomic disenfranchisement is a personal failure and that success is defined by‘making a name for oneself’ in the world of glamour. Shilpa understands hertask clearly: to ‘show’ the world that India is really about beauty andentrepreneurial success, not slums and poverty. Losing neither time noropportunity, India Tourism brought out a full page ad in the Guardianlast week in the form of an open letter to Jade Goody inviting her to experienceits ‘modern thriving culture’, ‘bustling cosmopolitan cities and quietcountryside’ and high-quality ‘healing spas’.

Even more disturbing is the way in which Jade and her‘chav’ milieu provide grist for the mill of self-congratulatory politicalcorrectness among upper-class white Britons. Pious editorials as well asimpolitic outbursts from the likes of Edwina Currie deplore the behaviourdisplayed by ‘slags’—as though racism an exclusively lower-classphenomenon. If anything, it is even more entrenched—because unacknowledged—inhigher echelons even if it sounds different murmured over a glass of sherry.Gordon Brown joined the Game of National Mythologies deploring the ways in whichJade and others did not represent that hackneyed British mantra: ‘a nation oftolerance and fairness’. 

Also nauseating is the play-off between Ugly White Slags and Beautiful IndianPrincesses—a familiar Orientalist male fantasy. With breathtaking lack ofself-consciousness, The Independent’s editorial of January 20^thdescribed a contest between ‘the low-life Ms Goody’ and ‘a pampered Indianmegastar of singular beauty’ (that Shilpa is hardly a megastar is beside thepoint). Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian deplored ‘ugly, thick whiteBritain and ‘one imperturbably dignified Indian woman [displaying] thesupposed British virtues of civility, articulacy and reserve’. Shilpa doesdeftly combine Orientalist fantasy and Lord Macaulay’s successfully realisedAnglicist project of creating ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour,but English’ in other ways (though she was arguably working on the colour bitwith a jar of bleach while pondering elocution lessons for Britishproletarians).

A national debate on race relations does need to take place. But it must bemore complex than the simple binaries and easy scapegoating provided byCelebrity Big Brother’s mud-wrestling idiocies. For this, all of us musttake a good hard look at racist practices and our own complicity in it. Let’shave done with the bullying on all sides.

Dr Priyamvada Gopal is Senior Lecturer of English, University of Cambridge. This is a version of an article that first appeared in theGuardian, London.